Wildfire model and management schedules

[Alex]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to model channel sedimentation from ~50 historical wildfires across a large composite watershed in New Mexico (2005–2024, with 5-year warmup starting 2000) and I cannot get the fires to burn the watershed. My TxtInOut is about 17GB (2GB zipped) and I'm running rev61.0.2 on Windows. 

My approach to this may have been shortsighted. I first reclassified landcover pixels that experienced high-severity wildfire (from Landfire) as a custom land use class (class 99 in my raster to a PINE swat class), so HRU boundaries follow wildfire perimeters. 93% of the replaced pixels where previously various forested classes (FRSE, FRSD, FRST) so pine should be reasonable. I then mapped each wildfire to a unique management schedule (e.g., fire_2011_6_26) with a burn operation referencing tree_intense from fire.ops, followed by a spring replant. Each burned HRU is assigned its own landuse.lum entry pointing to the correct fire-date schedule, so different HRUs burn on different dates.

I assume no re-burn overlap within the 20-year period.

My burn operations are not executing. I've confirmed this with mgtout — no burn operations appear in the log. The engine runs successfully (exit code 0), but my factual (with fire and attached here) simulation and counterfactual (without fire) simulation channel_sd_mon.txt outputs are almost identical.

I've verified works that the fire.ops files contains tree_intense (cn2_upd=8.0, frac_burn=0.90), my management.sch has 50 fire schedule blocks with burn + plant operations, my landuse.lum has 50 fire LUM entries correctly referencing fire schedules, and my hru-data.hru has the 693 HRUs assigned to fire LUM entries, and the file.cio registers fire.ops under the ops line.


I think the issue is my management.sch format. I wrote manual operations by hand since the Editor only seems to generate auto-scheduled operations via decision tables. Here's what my schedule block looks like:

fire_2005_6_22                2
  burn         6         6         22        0         tree_intense                 0             0
  plant        7         4         1         0         pine                         0             0


I've uploaded my full zipped TxtInOut here for anyone willing to take a look:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DbjvpnX2hvCHSYjPh7myPND4zCPgFN0e/view?usp=drive_link

Appreciate any help — I feel close, but have been stuck on this for a while. I may be approaching SWAT completely wrong. 

Best,
Alex